Brooks` New Album Ropin` Sales Orders

September 28, 1991|By JACK HURST, Tribune Media Services

Garth Brooks` new third album, Ropin` the Wind, has shipped platinum, meaning with sales orders of more than 1 million, even though it is reported by Billboard magazine to be the first regular country album in history carrying a recommended price above $10.

With his quadruple-platinum No Fences album still riding the top of the charts a year after it came out, Brooks sees its successor -- tagged at $10.98 -- as no clone, calling it his ``postcard from the edge.``

``If I`ve got to come to the plate to follow No Fences, then Ropin` the Wind is the bat I`d grab,`` he says. ``It will either be a big loss or a big gain -- because it`s absolutely not a `No Fences, 2.` The way I am wouldn`t allow me to try to make a record that was nothing more than a sequel.

``Of course, I could be wrong. I had no idea that The Thunder Rolls video would turn into what it did!`` That video, with its depiction of a battered wife who finally turns violently on her husband, was banned by cable networks TNN and CMT, and the new album contains another possibly controversial song.

Titled Papa Loved Mama and possessing the cartoon quality of the Rodney Crowell hit, She`s Crazy for Leavin`, it`s a humorously treated lyric Brooks co-wrote about a truck driver who does away with his unfaithful wife in an unpremeditated but highly imaginative manner.

Arguably the hottest figure on the American music scene, Brooks recently has been compared by Bob Hope to Hope`s longtime friend, pop crooner Bing Crosby. Quoth Hope on the NBC-TV Today show:

``He`s got that low, low MONEY voice.``

Without being jarringly so, Ropin` the Wind perceptibly widens the musical scope of America`s hottest vocal cowboy, most notably with the Billy Joel song, Shameless. There`s some of the Friends in Low Places and Two of a Kind (Workin` on a Full House) raucousness and sizzle in cuts titled Papa Loved Mama, We Bury the Hatchet and Against the Grain, but there`s also great western emotional sweep in Rodeo (which distinctively features bluesy, rather than western, instrumentation) and in Lonesome Dove. There`s holiday-season loneliness in Cold Shoulder, as well as more conventional songs of love and hurt, such as What She`s Doing Now, Burning Bridges and a dreamer`s anthem, The River. This is an excellent collection of music both entertaining and thought-provoking -- 70 percent of which was co-written by its singer.

-- On the Record: Kentucky HeadHunters lead singer Ricky Lee Phelps -- noting that the group`s recent, unsuccessful single, Body and Soul, was an attempt to follow the mainstream, non-HeadHunter path up the country hit charts -- adds: ``That`s the only time, first and last, that we`ll try that.``

``I think Kentucky Bluebird really provides a sense of perspective on Keith: who he was and where he came from,`` Fundis says. ``Keith made his own mark in his own time, and I really think that time and history and hopefully this album will prove how great he was, and how many people he really influenced.``